He had thought that perhaps Admiral Paris would be here to see them off, but he wasn’t. Instead, there were only a pair of engineers and a security officer. The campus had been buzzing with word of an attack on a lone engineer in a Starfleet Command transporter room late the night before. Will had missed most of the rumors, his mind on other things, and intentionally made an effort not to listen to them because he was already overtired and knew that he needed to be able to devote all his attention to the mission at hand. But he figured it explained the extra precautions in this room, on this morning.

Felicia looked up from her hushed conversation with Dennis and noticed Will in the doorway. She smiled at him and beckoned him over. Dennis turned, too, at Felicia’s gesture, tossing Will a friendly grin of his own. “Glad you could join us, Will,” he said, sarcasm leavened by good-natured humor.

“I seem to be developing a bad habit,” Will said. “I never used to be late to everything.”

“You’re not late,” Felicia assured him. “We’re early. Just too excited about the project, I guess.”

Will bit back another yawn. He was excited too, and should have been early, but everything had taken extra effort this morning, from getting his breakfast, to dressing, to making his way here to the transporter room. He didn’t want to have to explain why, though. If the old man had gotten himself into some kind of trouble, it was no concern of Will’s. The last thing he wanted was for his squadron to think that he would be distracted by his father’s problems, whatever they may be.

“As long as I didn’t hold anything up,” he said. He recognized that much of his concern was due to his own impatience. Just this last project stood between him and summer break, which would be followed by his penultimate Academy year. Two more, and after that he could sign onto a starship and get off this planet for a while.

“Not at all,” Dennis assured him. “But now that we’re all here ...” He addressed the pair of engineers. “We’re ready, I guess. Whenever you are.”

One of the engineers, a Bolian with an unusual fringe of brown hair around the back of his blue, bifurcated head, stepped forward then and examined the cadets. “No phasers, no tricorders, no padds, no combadges. You aren’t hiding anything from me, are you?”

“Not at all,” Dennis assured them. Boon, Will noted, hadn’t changed his position or his slumped posture, as if the whole process was so boring he could barely stay awake.

“Then I have one thing for you.” The Bolian handed Dennis a sealed envelope.

“Paper,” Estresor Fil noted. “How ... antiquated.”

“You won’t have instruments with which to read anything else,” the engineer explained.

“We’re supposed to consider ourselves crash-landed in hostile territory,” Dennis added. “Without our technology to rely on.”

“That’s what they tell us,” the other engineer, a human female with swept-up blond hair, said. “Step onto the pads, please.”

The five cadets did as instructed. Boon was the last one in place. Will thought he seemed reluctant, maybe even resentful. Because we put Dennis in charge?he wondered. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that—it’s Boon’s last chance to lead this squadron, and I took it away from him.But it had been the squadron’s tradition to do so from time to time, so it shouldn’t have been entirely unexpected. And Boon himself had brought it up.

Will didn’t have a chance to worry about it any longer, though. As soon as Boon was in position, the engineers began their process. “Coordinates locked,” said the human, and the Bolian, nodding, touched his keypad.

“Good luck,” the Bolian said. As he did, he began to fade from view, and Will realized that the annular confinement beam was surrounding him, beginning the process of converting his molecules into energy that could be sent to a specific, predetermined point. He had aced his transporter theory class last year, and he had been transported numerous times. But that experience hadn’t quite soothed his concerns. He knew full well that the technology was safe and time-tested, but at the same time there was something just a bit wrong about it that he wasn’t able to get used to.

He didn’t have time to worry about it for more than a few seconds, though, before he found himself rematerializing someplace else. After a perfunctory self-examination to make sure all his parts had shown up when he did, he glanced about, looking for any of his squadron mates. But there were no transporter beams evident, and no one around. He was alone.

Dennis Haynes recognized his location, and, if it hadn’t been too much like a bad joke, he would have described the sensation in his gut as a sinking feeling. He was looking across water—a lot of water—toward Fisherman’s Wharf and the Embarcadero. Which could only mean that he’d been beamed to Alcatraz.

And Alcatraz was an island. An island that had formerly been used as a prison, at that. It had, of course, been a prison because it was difficult to get from there to the mainland without a boat.

Sadly, Dennis hadn’t been able to bring one with him.

What he did have with him was a paper envelope. He sat on the jagged rocks at the island’s edge and tore it open, appreciating the forethought that had gone into using such an old-fashioned technology. They’d been correct—he wouldn’t have been able to read anything except paper, here.

Of course, if he couldn’t get off the island, it wouldn’t matter much what the words on the paper said. He’d be unable to communicate with his squadron, and they’d all fail the project—and the class. He looked toward the mainland again. He could swim it, maybe. But it’d be bitter cold, and he figured the chances were fifty-fifty that he’d drown in the effort. That, he decided, would be a last resort.

Seriously last. The more he contemplated it, the laster it got.

Tearing his gaze away from the waves, he removed a sheet of paper from inside the envelope. A stiff breeze from off the water tore at it, threatening to yank it from his grip. But the paper—really, he knew, a polymer with many of the same characteristics as the old-fashioned stuff, whose name this material shared out of convenience—held firm against the wind’s worst efforts. Written on it was a single sentence. “At the feet of these twins, find your first checkpoint.”

Short, sweet, and almost completely unhelpful,Dennis thought. He knew from the reports of previous years that finding the checkpoints was often the most difficult part of the assignment. And it wouldn’t have helped if he’d been given coordinates and a map, if he couldn’t get off this damn rock. The squadron had agreed to meet at the peak of Nob Hill, as quickly as possible after being transported into the city, because it was a more or less central location. Already, Dennis was sure, the others would be rushing to the meeting point But he, their leader for this project, wouldn’t be there.

Well,he thought, forcing himself to his feet and casting his gaze about the rocky outcrop. Things certainly look bad, but I’m not ready to admit defeat quite yet.

* * *

I might as well have walked here,Estresor Fil thought with mild disappointment. She had beamed in at the near end of the Golden Gate Bridge, which was barely a stone’s throw from the Academy itself. She hadn’t been sent far at all, but she had a good distance ahead of her to get to the meeting point. Cutting through Academy grounds would shorten the trip, though of course she couldn’t do that. She was in civilian clothes and carried no Starfleet identification, and stepping onto Academy or Starfleet Command grounds was cause for instant disqualification.

Even the nearest tram station was the Academy stop, so she couldn’t catch a transport there. She started walking, giving the Academy a wide berth, toward the nearest public station. With her short legs, it would take her a good while to get there. But at least the project was under way.